IDFPR completes transition

Process results in 22.3 percent decrease in licensees

State regulators have finalized license transition for real estate agents, ending a three-year process that required additional training and has resulted in a 22.3 percent decrease in overall licensees in Illinois.

The state Department of Financial and Professional Regulation confirmed to the Illinois Association of REALTORS® late Tuesday that it had entered in the thousands of applications from Illinois real estate agents.

Those practitioners who had not completed the necessary steps to transition their license by April 30, 2012 are now classified in the system as “non-renewed” if they are brokers and “expired” if they are salespersons. Those who want to check the status of a real estate practitioner’s license can find it on IDFPR’s website, www.idfpr.com[1].

According to the IDFPR, there were 69,228 licensees on April 30, 2011. At the close of processing, the agency said there were 53,785 licensees. Regulators said they had expected about a 20 percent decrease in the overall number of licensees. The decrease released Tuesday amounts to 15,443 fewer licensees overall.

IAR is still tallying its final numbers, but as of July 27 the association had 38,853 members, down from 45,654 in 2011. That’s a 15 percent decrease in association membership, slightly less than what had been projected.

Prior to the transition effort, IAR represented 66 percent of real estate practitioners in the state. Post-transition, IAR represents 72 percent of licensees in the state.

“While this has been a long process, the numbers clearly show that if you’re serious about selling real estate in Illinois, you are more likely to be a REALTOR®,” said Loretta Alonzo, CRB, GRI, IAR president and broker/owner of Century 21 Alonzo and Associates in La Grange Park. “IAR worked with its members to help them understand and navigate transition, and these efforts clearly paid off.”

IAR worked closely with IDFPR throughout the transition process to make sure members had the training needed to make the switch. The transition process eliminated the salesperson category in favor of a broker license, and those with a broker license were to transition to a managing broker license.

For many members, filing applications came down to the very last hours before the deadline. IAR fielded thousands of calls to its help desk, and overall the association provided more than 7 million impressions in print and online reminding members of the necessity of getting the training and paperwork in order to complete transition. IAR provided last-minute testing opportunities for members throughout the state up until the deadline day.

According to IDFPR:

30,278 people made the transition from a salesperson license to broker.

16,373 people made the transition from broker to managing broker.

Currently there are 37,248 brokers licensed to work in the state. There are 16,537 managing brokers, according to IDFPR.

The state agency said Tuesday that it was still finalizing the lists. There were a few practitioners who filed applications missing information, and IDFPR is working to make sure the agents falling into that category are aware of the deficiencies.

The April 30, 2012 deadline passed with many real estate agents unclear on whether their applications had been processed. IDFPR hired temporary workers to sort through the thousands of last-minute applications.